Galaxy S9 and S9+ users weren't expecting an Android 9 Pie update until January, but it seems Samsung is kicking things off early. So far, reports of the update are coming in from S9 and S9+ owners (both those with Oreo and those in the Pie beta program) in European countries including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy, as well as the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Every year, a new version of Android is released, and every year, lots of improvements are made. That's a given, but sometimes useful features fall by the wayside as well. In Android 8.0 Oreo, you can easily see a list of the apps for which you have blocked notifications. In Android 9 Pie, that list has vanished.

Over the past few weeks, some owners of the 2016 Pixel XL have reported problems using quick chargers on Android P. For most of that time, Android P was still in beta, so bugs were to be expected. Unfortunately, issues with quick charging are still present in the final 9.0 release.

Earlier this year, AOSP commits revealed that Android 9.0 would support printing via Wi-Fi Direct. Put simply, it would allow your phone to print documents over a peer-to-peer connection (without being on the same Wi-Fi network). Some manufacturers have added Wi-Fi Direct support to their own print service plugins, but the native Android print service didn't have it.

When someone says "Oh, that's just my work phone," you'd be surprised if it's not an iPhone. But Android does offer an increasingly capable enterprise experience, and more improvements are on the way with Android P this year. Many general new features have been uncovered and announced in recent weeks, particularly since the beta launched at Google I/O, but we haven't heard much about what used to be called Android for Work.

Unbeknownst to most users (myself included until recently), Android apps on current and previous versions of the OS get unrestricted access to your network activity. There's no permission for you to accidentally say okay to, it's just allowed for all. This means that any app can detect when another app is connecting to an external server, and while the content is not visible, even just the source of the connection could be used for a nefarious purpose.

With a renewed focus on privacy and data collection, not least in the wake of the recent Facebook scandals, this type of potential security flaw clearly needs to be addressed.

Android P is the latest iteration of Google’s mobile operating system, and it’s been available to test as a Developer Preview on the company’s Pixel phones for about a month now. I flashed the preview on my Pixel 2 XL a few weeks ago and have been using the phone as my daily driver since.

Overall, this is easily the most polished day-one build Google has released. I’m not having any battery drain issues, annoying app crashes, or random reboots. The P preview is, dare I say, very usable.